A Christian business owner wouldn’t print business cards for a transgender woman who demanded his services, saying that doing so goes against his Christian values and beliefs.
After a transgender diversity consultant, Joanne Lockwood, asked Nigel Williams to print business cards to advertise his “SEE Change Happen” firm, Williams refused, according to the Independent. He said he did not feel comfortable offering his services to promote a firm that gives companies advice on transgender inclusion, equality, and diversity and that doing so goes against his religious convictions.
“The new model of diversity is used (or misused) to marginalise (or indeed discriminate against) Christians in their workplaces and other parts of society if they do not subscribe to it,” Williams wrote in an email replying to Lockwood’s request for business cards. “Although I’m quite sure you have no intention of marginalising Christians, it would weigh heavily upon me if through my own work I was to make pressure worse for fellow Christians,” he added.
“I was not expecting a lecture. I disbelieved this could happen in 2017… I have been the victim of some discrimination,” Lockwood told the Independent, describing her reaction to Williams’ email.
“It is a fundamental tenet of free speech and freedom of belief that people should not be forced to help promote causes flatly contrary to their own deeply held views,” said the Christian Institute in Williams’ defense.
Of late, the legal rights of businesses and persons in regard to transgender issues have been more and more frequently coming into question in the U.K. and as frequently, if not more so, within the U.S. California Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed legislation lowering the maximum penalty for those who knowingly infect or expose another person to HIV.
Brown also signed legislation penalizing health care workers who use the wrong pronouns to refer to senior transgender patients. (RELATED: Legal Experts: Transgender Pronoun Mandates Are Unconstitutional)
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